For Home Office questions most MPs stayed at home. It was the wind. A tree had fallen down somewhere below the Humber. Maybe if we had Polish MPs they’d turn up more. I withdraw that at once.

Norman Baker presented some scheme, or effort to keep young people out of the reach of criminal gangs. There goes the west Midlands police recruitment drive.

That was followed by a slip of the tongue – perhaps or perhaps not. Theresa May told the House that crime in the Thames Valley Police had fallen by 25 per cent. She then thanked the officers who “contributed to these good crime figures”.

The full scale of the Plebgate police behaviour – its audacity, and scope – hasn’t sunk into the parliamentary consciousness. They wouldn’t be asking politely for an apology at the bar of the House but for a trial and jail terms.

Read the transcript of the meeting between Mitchell and the three police pilgrims (it’s on the Guardian website). The sheer lyingness of their behaviour in the meeting, outside the meeting, in front of the select committee – these need to be savoured in full.

Theresa May wants a “code of ethics” to regulate the police. But one of the policemen claimed he was bound by the Code during their interview. A Code doesn’t stop this sort of institutional dishonesty.

Ms May – and her shadow Yvette Cooper both want more power for the Police Complaints Commission. True, they performed well enough, supervising the investigation. But their reason for not insisting that the report’s original conclusion be reinstated was intricately legalistic, and very far from any principle of ordinary, natural, commonsense justice.

They allowed three ruling chief constables to change a conclusion of misconduct (or better yet, gross misconduct) to ‘no case to answer’.